Navy teams adopt Panasonic P2 HD camcorders

September 11, 2009

The Navy Midshipmen football and men’s lacrosse teams, representing the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, in NCAA Division I college competition, have purchased six Panasonic AG-HPX500 P2 HD camcorders equipped with BTLH80WU 7.9in color viewfinders for coaching analysis.

Football dates back to 1879 at the Naval Academy, the undergraduate college that educates and commissions officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The annual Army–Navy game represents one of the most traditional and enduring rivalries in college football and is televised every year by CBS. Navy men’s lacrosse, a dominant team throughout the 20th-century and beyond, has competed since 2004 as a member of the NCAA’s Patriot League, and the Midshipmen have won the League tournament five times in the past six years.

Both sports use the Panasonic HPX500 with the DVSport GameDay editing and data analysis software package and exchange game videos with competitors over the Internet using the DragonFly Storm video exchange system.

During football practice, the team uses two adjacent fields. Two HPX500s on lifts are assigned to defense with both cameras in the end zone — one shooting wide angle and the second a tighter angle. On offense, two HPX500s, one on a lift and one shoulder-mounted, shoot from the sideline. Video is recorded to P2 cards, and during game play, an assistant will start to break down the video immediately after the first quarter.

During training camp, the team finishes breakdown work at 7 p.m., instead of 9:30 p.m. when it used tape-based video systems. The practices and games are put on a main server in the football building (a system lacrosse shares). There are 30 coaching stations for football and nine for lacrosse. During the course of seasons, DVDs can be printed out for players to watch in their dorms or for coaches’ off-site use. For football game exchanges, the offensive, defensive and kicking games are copied to an external drive and traded over the Internet using the Storm system.